


Man of Sin

by chiiyo86



Category: Original Work
Genre: Antichrist, Blackmail, Breaking Celibacy Vows, Coercion, First Time Blow Jobs, Hand & Finger Kink, Homophobia, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Monks, Post-Apocalypse, Religious Guilt, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 00:04:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19051207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: After the end of the world, Jordanes lives a peaceful life at the abbey. But within those holy walls also resides Alatharic, who used to bear a few other names before he was turned back into a baby and grew up again for sixteen years. He was the False Prophet. The Lawless One. The Man of Sin. TheAntichrist.





	Man of Sin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



> I'm reading Umberto Eco's _The Name of the Rose_ and, I don't know, this fic just popped in my head fully formed. Hope you enjoy it!

Life at the abbey was a simple, peaceful one. Monotonous, Jordanes would have said, if there had been anyone around willing to listen without chastising him for being ungrateful. It wasn’t that Jordanes didn’t know everything he owed to the monks for taking him in as a five-year-old orphan. It wasn’t that he ignored that it was better to live the frugal, ordered life of the abbey rather than to fend for himself in a ravaged world that was only slowly rebuilding itself. Many people had died during the End Times, including Jordanes’ parents. Many more were dying from diseases, hunger and the results of strife, or so the abbot liked to tell them every day, asking them to include those poor souls in their prayers. Here, in their little abbey planted on the steep flank of a mountain, all the troubles of the outside world didn’t seem quite real. There wasn’t much difference between the wars of the past that Jordanes read about in books and the supposed problems of the present. Even the Tribulations of End Times, the reason why Jordanes had lost his family and been sent to the abbey, sometimes felt like some fantastic story that the monks had made up to scare him. He’d been no older than five when it had ended with the defeat of the Antichrist. He could barely remember his own parents. 

Only one thing remained here as a testimony to those dark times: Alatharic. He and Jordanes had come to the abbey at around the same time. Alatharic had been a baby, then, but he’d been someone else before that, or maybe it would have been more accurate to say _something_ else. He was now named Alatharic after the man who’d brought him at the abbey and convinced the abbot to keep him, but he had born other names before. The False Prophet. The Lawless One. The Man of Sin. The _Antichrist_. Whatever had happened during Armageddon had reduced him to a suckling baby, and Alatharic the Old had taken it upon himself to find the infant a place to grow up again. 

Jordanes hated Alatharic. Not because of anything the boy had said or done during the sixteen years they’d spent together at the abbey—in fact, Jordanes had only ever shared a few curt words with him—but because of everything he’d done _before_. The end of the world. The end of Jordanes’ family. The destruction of the future he would have had if not for Alatharic. He didn’t know what Alatharic the Old, now long dead, had said to the abbot to make him accept that seed of destruction within the walls of the abbey, and he didn’t understand why the rest of the monks had accepted it without protesting. No one ever breathed a word about it; even oblique references to it were frowned upon. The monks didn’t treat Alatharic very differently from Jordanes, just with a little more distance. It was even possible that Altharic didn’t know who he used to be, unless Alatharic the Old or the abbot had told him, or unless he retained memories from his previous life. In the latter case, who could say that Alatharic wasn’t biding his time, waiting until he’d grown into his own and recovered his former power so he could bring about the end of what remained of the world?

If no one else was going to do it, then Jordanes at least would keep an eye on him. He had all the latitude to do so during the long days that they both spent at the scriptorium, Jordanes as a copyist and Alatharic as an illuminator. Alatharic was a boy of sixteen, slim and graceful, with a head of blond curls and clear blue eyes. He was quiet and subservient most of the time, but was prone to sudden bouts of insolence, as though he harbored a secret anger that he couldn’t always control—something that Jordanes understood all too well, although it pained him to have anything in common with Alatharic. Alaltharic’s illuminations were as beautiful as he was: vivid, colorful, detailed, _seductive_. It was the object of all the monks’ admiration, an admiration that Jordanes thought was tinged with discomfort. Either Alatharic’s beauty and talent came from God or they came from _somewhere else_ , and given the circumstances of Alatharic’s previous life, it would have greatly surprised Jordanes if the other monks hadn’t secretly wondered about it. As long as Alatharic behaved, though, there was nothing to do but to feel uneasy. At the scriptorium, Jordanes glanced every so often at the boy, who sat a few desks away from him. He only ever saw him hunched over his current work, his mouth pinched in concentration, his long, elegant hands moving swiftly over the paper. If Alatharic was planning anything, then Jordanes had never seen any sign of it.

Jordanes could only do so much watching before he got bored out of his mind. Copying was also a tedious, repetitive task, and it couldn’t hold his attention for long. So for the past few months, Jordanes had taken to doing something that he knew would get him in trouble if he were caught; maybe the fear of getting caught was part of the thrill. He knew that what he was doing was wrong, but it wasn’t as wrong as… well, not as wrong as Alatharic destroying three quarters of the entire world. It wasn’t so wrong that Jordanes felt like he needed to confess it as a sin. Theft was a sin, but he wasn’t _stealing._ He was just… borrowing some of the books without notifying Viliaris, the librarian. Viliaris had already chided Jordanes for being too interested in the outside world, and if Jordanes had asked for the books, he knew that Viliaris would have forbidden him to take them and maybe given him a lecture on top of it. So Jordanes took—no, _borrowed_ —the books that interested him, opened them on his lap when he was in the scriptorium and then read them as he copied his work. When he was done with the book, he quietly put it back in place and Viliaris never had a clue that it had been gone in the first place.

He had been growing confident in his ability to keep doing this unnoticed until one day, as the monks stood one by one to leave the scriptorium for prayers, Alatharic walked by Jordanes and whispered, “I hope this was an interesting book.”

Jordanes’ heart stopped at the words. They had been uttered in a voice so low that they couldn’t have been aimed at anyone but Jordanes, even though Jordanes had taken care to hide his borrowed book under scraps of paper in his desk. How could have Alatharic known? Jordanes’ desk was at the back of the scriptorium and the monks were all so absorbed in their work that no one ever saw what Jordanes was doing. Had Alatharic just _known_ , through some vile, Devil-given mind-reading power? Was he going to denounce him to Viliaris? If such was his intention, then why tell Jordanes about it in advance? Was it to torment him? Jordanes knew why he hated Alatharic, but he didn’t think he’d ever given the boy a reason to hate him in return. 

Jordanes spent two entire days turning those questions in his mind, expecting Viliaris, or maybe the abbot himself, to come to him with angry questions. He continued to observe Alatharic, but the boy wasn’t behaving differently from usual and didn’t seem to pay Jordanes any mind. Jordanes watched his bowed head during prayer time, looked at his thoughtful face during mealtime, as they listened to a reading of extracts from the Second New Testament. It gave him no clue about what was going on behind that angelic face. Eventually, he almost started thinking that he’d hallucinated Alatharic talking to him, that his guilty conscience had played a trick on him.

He found relief in that thought, but that relief was shattered when Alatharic approached him after supper and murmured to him, “Join me in my cell one hour after compline.”

Jordanes clenched his fists and bit on his tongue not to yell at him. Who did that little hell spawn think he was? If he had just wanted to denounce Jordanes he would have done it already, and this meeting time was most suspicious. It looked like he wanted to blackmail Jordanes, although Jordanes couldn’t think of anything that the boy would want from him. Still, he knew that he couldn’t risk ignoring Alatharic’s ominous rendezvous. In two days, he’d had ample time to think of what would happen if his habit of borrowing books came to the abbot’s ears and was now afraid that he wouldn’t just get away with a lecture. What if the abbot decided to kick Jordanes out of the abbey? Even if he’d always wondered about the outside world, it made Jordanes’ stomach lurch to imagine trying to survive out there by himself. 

Also, he couldn’t help a flicker of curiosity about what Alatharic wanted. They’d never had what could be called a conversation with each other, and this was an occasion to figure out the boy.

After compline, Jordanes retired to his cell just like the rest of his brethren. There he watched out the narrow window as daylight dimmed and dusk settled. He looked at the stout silhouette of the chapter house, wrapped in strips of a thick fog that hid the mountain beyond the outer walls. Even on a good day, the sun was no more than a pallid disk veiled by the ever-present mist, another remainder from End Times. The damp cold that always clung to the stone walls only grew stronger when night fell and Jordanes wrapped his blanket around his shoulders, burying his hands in his sleeves as he waited. He waited for an hour, as per Alatharic’s instructions, before he slipped outside his cell, silently making his way to the other end of the corridor where Alatharic’s cell was. 

In front of Alatharic’s door, he spent a few seconds wondering whether he should knock despite the risk that it might draw the attention of the other monks. His procrastination ended when the door opened unprompted. Either Alatharic had heard Jordanes shuffling outside his door or he’d known he was there through occult means.

“Come in,” he said curtly. Jordanes entered and Alatharic closed the door behind him.

There was nothing to distinguish Alatharic’s cell from Jordanes’ own—same four whitewashed walls, same narrow bed, same desk under the window and same wooden chest to keep his few possessions. Despite the similarities, Jordanes felt like he had just penetrated a very private space, and the acute awareness he had of that privacy made him nervous. Of course, he was also nervous to hear what Alatharic had to say. 

“So, what did you want to tell me?” he asked brusquely, unable to wait for Alatharic to speak first. 

“You know what I want to say,” Alatharic said cockily. “I saw you reading that book. I know you wouldn’t have been hiding it like that if you had Viliaris’ permission to take it out.”

From where Alatharic’s desk was placed in the scriptorium, it wouldn’t have been possible for him to see what Jordanes was doing unless he’d been specifically looking. 

“Were you spying on me?”

“You’re always doing things like that,” Alatharic said, an excited note in his voice that Jordanes had never heard before. “You used to pinch stuff from the kitchens. You mixed the inks at the scriptorium. You—”

Jordanes’ blood had gone as cold as a frozen river. “ _How_ do you know about that?”

Alatharic’s mouth snapped shut. He looked away, his cheeks turning pink. “I’m always looking at you.”

He’d been watching Jordanes. Of course, Jordanes had been watching him too, but he had a good reason for doing it. What was Alatharic’s motivation?

“What do you want from me?” Jordanes asked hollowly, his mouth dry from dread. 

“I—” Alatharic’s mouth opened and closed a few times and his cheeks flushed with a darker blush. It made him look young and uncertain. “I want—”

He moved so suddenly that Jordanes didn’t have the time to react. In the blink of an eye, Alatharic had grabbed Jordanes’ face with both hands and pressed their mouths together. Jordanes froze. Time stopped. His heart thumped deafeningly in his ears. He tasted rust and thought he might have bitten his tongue.

It lasted seconds, or maybe minutes, before everything snapped back into focus and Jordanes came back to himself. He shoved Alatharic away from him and stumbled a few steps backward, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“What are you _doing_?” He realized he’d shouted and forced himself to lower his voice. “What was that?”

“What I want. I—I love you.”

“ _This_ isn’t love. This is sinful!” But why should Jordanes be surprised at that, given what Alatharic was? He’d been looking for evidence of Alatharic’s evil nature for years, and there it was.

“It’s not—” Alatharic’s mouth quivered and for one, fleeting moment he looked at a loss. That expression smoothed over when he clenched his jaw, lifted his chin and said in a challenging voice, “What do you think will happen if I tell the abbot about what you did? Not just about the books, but about all your other tricks. Who knows, maybe the outside world would suit you well.”

The echo to Jordanes’ earlier worries had his heart beating faster. If Alatharic had only known about the books, then it wouldn’t have been a true reason for concern. Despite Jordanes’ fretting, he didn’t really think that the abbot would send him away just for a few books. If he knew about the rest… Jordanes had never done anything truly wrong, but the cumulation of years of mischief might make him think that Jordanes didn’t appreciate the shelter that the abbey was giving him. 

“Don’t say anything!” Jordanes blurted out. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

He wasn’t sure what _that_ might entail, and from the look on Alatharic’s face, the boy wasn’t sure either. That didn’t seem to discourage him, though. He took a deep breath and stepped closer to Jordanes, reached out and cupped Jordanes’ face, lightly stroking his cheek. His slender, wonderfully talented hands were soft except for the calluses from his work as an illuminator. Jordanes swallowed hard. Alatharic’s blue eyes were wide, his lips slightly parted and his chest heaving. 

“Don’t move,” he told Jordanes, a slight quiver to his voice. 

Jordanes thought he was going to kiss him again and braced himself for it. What Alatharic did instead was reach between Jordanes’ legs and grab his penis through his robes. Jordanes jumped and cried out, then slapped a hand over his mouth.

“Sshh,” Alatharic said, pressing a kiss at the corner of Jordanes’ lips while his hand kept fondling him between his legs. Jordanes trembled as heat pooled at the pit of his stomach. “You don’t want anyone to hear us.”

To imagine anyone in the abbey coming upon them in their current position made Jordanes’ face burn and his insides knot. If that happened, then he would willingly leave the abbey and try his luck in the outside world. Now Alatharic had truly damned him—Jordanes had never done anything sinful before today.

Alatharic pulled away a little, contemplating Jordanes with a critical eye. His face was flushed and his eyes sparkled. “Lean against the wall,” he said, pushing Jordanes until he had the wall at his back. “I want to—”

Jordanes watched in confusion as Alatharic went down to his knees, but when the boy lifted Jordanes’ robes his heart quickened again. It had been one thing for Alatharic to feel him through his clothing, but the sight of his own erect penis standing at an angle with his stomach made Jordanes’ mouth fill with bile. _Oh, Lord. You who can see in every man’s heart, you know that I have never wanted this. I have been tricked and trapped by the Antichrist himself, your Enemy. He is back and will lead us to our ruin again._

Alatharic didn’t seem to share Jordanes’ metaphysical despair. His expression was one of childlike wonder as he looked as Jordanes’ erect flesh and licked his lips. Horrified, Jordanes saw his hard prick twitch and rise under Alatharic’s gaze. 

“I have wanted this for so long,” Alatharic murmured and then leaned forward.

Jordanes couldn’t watch anymore, so he rested the back of his head against the wall and closed his eyes. Something warm and wet, like a tongue, touched his oversensitive flesh and Jordanes bit his lips to keep the sounds bubbling in his throat contained. The touches were hesitant, furtive. _Maddening_. Jordanes’ hips started to jerk forward and he had to make an effort to keep still. _What’s happening to me?_

He felt a hand, Alatharic’s hand, wrap itself around the base of his prick. His eyes shot open to look down, and he immediately wished that he hadn’t, because to see Alatharic’s soft white hand on him made something deep inside his chest twist and contract, squirm as if one of his organs were trying to escape. His body was aflame, and for the first time in his life he wasn’t so sure that the flames of Hell that the abbot enjoyed discoursing about were a metaphor. He didn’t feel too clever for the abbey’s lessons anymore—he felt lost, scared, like his body had been wrenched out of his own control and turned against him, a tool to his own damnation. 

Alatharic continued to give Jordanes’ penis curious licks, then took the tip inside his mouth. Jordanes gasped out loud, the fire in his loins flaring up. 

“Don’t,” he begged. “Stop. Please, stop. Please, please, please.”

There was nothing more obscene than to see the tip of his penis slip from between Alatharic’s red shiny lips. “You don’t want me to stop,” he declared. “ _I_ don’t want to stop.”

He stood up, and for a moment Jordanes had the foolish hope that despite what he’d just said, Alatharic was going to let him go now. That hope was all but extinguished when he saw the lewd tent that Alatharic’s robes made.

“Turn around,” Alatharic said. “Face against the wall.” 

Jordanes knew he should have protested, but he had no fight left in him and he complied numbly. He felt Alatharic stand behind him and that made his heart pound, then he felt hands on the bare skin of his hips and his breath caught in his throat. He crossed his arms on the wall and pressed his face into them, refusing to look at any more of it, blinding himself to the sight of his red, leaking penis jutting out of his bunched-up robes.

“Don’t worry,” Alatharic murmured, his breath warm and damp against Jordanes’ neck. He pressed a kiss behind his ear. “I’m going to take care of you.”

By closing his eyes, Jordanes realized he’d reduced himself to the sensations of his skin. Alatharic’s grip on his hips tightened and he draped himself over Jordanes’ back. After sounds of rustling fabric, Jordanes felt something hot and wet slip between his legs from behind. Alatharic’s hard prick. Jordanes was overcome by a wave of vertigo. Alatharic’s prick rubbed against the sensitive skin between his legs, against his ballsack, against the underside of Jordanes’ own erect prick. It burned and rubbed, and rubbed and ached. _Stop, stop, stop,_ Jordanes thought, but the tightness in his groin had become unbearable and if Alatharic stopped now then he felt like he might die from a lack of release. A loud, uncontrolled moan echoed in the room and Jordanes recognized with mortification that it had come from his own mouth.

“Shush,” Alatharic said, and Jordanes felt a hand cover his mouth.

The hand was probably there to keep him quiet, but instead of clamping down the palm brushed against Jordanes’ lips, then the fingers did the same. Jordanes had slightly opened his mouth to let his harsh breaths escape and one of Alatharic’s long, agile fingers invaded it. Jordanes could have closed his mouth to prevent the intrusion. He could have snapped his teeth on the finger. Instead he welcomed it, let it explore the roof of his mouth and rest on his tongue before he started to suck on it. He sucked hard, circled the knuckles with his tongue, and now Alatharic was the one gasping to his ear. It made a powerful sentiment of triumph bloom in Jordanes’ chest, an excitement that washed over some of the horror he’d been feeling. He felt something wet splash under his prick, Alatharic’s _seed_ , and it made his prick jump, his lungs contract. He shuddered and moaned around Alatharic’s digit as he lost himself to a heated wave more intense than he’d ever known, spilling his seed against the wall. 

It took him maybe a minute to come down crashing from that scorching heat. Alatharic had moved away, his weight no longer on Jordanes’ back, and the loss made Jordanes feel cold and unfettered. He opened his eyes and looked dumbly at the pearly substance that stuck to the white wall, the evidence of his crime. The shame that had left him for a moment came back, stronger than ever.

“So you got what you wanted,” he said in a rough voice that he didn’t recognize as his own.

Alatharic’s pale face was still blotched with red and he was smiling broadly. “Oh, yes, and this was better than I had dreamed it would be!” he said, words rushing out of his mouth excitedly. “You felt _so_ good. You were so perfect! Oh, Jordanes, you—”

“Am I the first one whose damnation you’ve orchestrated?” Jordanes asked, anger at Alatharic’s blatant joy rising in him. “Or were there others before me? I should go to the abbot and tell him about what has happened tonight.”

Alatharic’s smile dropped and his face shuttered. “If you tell him, then you risk his wrath too.”

“It would be worth it if it saved our brethren from you,” Jordanes uttered through clenched teeth.

“From me? What are you talking about?”

“You’re aiming at the destruction of this abbey, one of the last bastions of light in this world, and I can’t let you do it!”

“What? I don’t want to destroy the abbey. I’m like you, I have nowhere else to go!”

“Then you want to turn it into a den of iniquity!”

“I don’t want that either! I just—” Alatharic bit down on his lower lip and to Jordanes’ utter bewilderment, his eyes started to shine with brimming tears. “There’s only _you_. I don’t want anyone else. I wouldn’t even have told the abbot about what you’ve done, I just wanted—” He cut himself off and turned away, hiding his face from Jordanes in the crook of his elbow. “Just go,” he said in a choked, muffled voice. “I won’t tell the abbot about the stupid books or about the rest. Go back to your cell.”

For a moment, Jordanes couldn’t move, his stomach churning with uncertainty. What was Alatharic playing at? Why the innocent act—was it a way to trick Jordanes into falling even deeper into sin or was Alatharic really just an innocent sixteen-year-old boy? But no, there had been nothing innocent about the way he had acted a moment before. No child could have thought of such depraved acts.

“You won’t tell the abbot?” he asked, even though it didn’t matter what Alatharic answered. If he was after Jordanes’ damnation, then lying wasn’t the worst thing he would do to ensure it.

“No! Just go away!”

Jordanes left Alatharic crying in his cell, trying to fight the guilt eating away at his guts. With a profound sense of despair, he realized that he was falling still and didn’t know how to stop it. This was how the world had ended the first time, he was certain of it. This was how Alatharic had precipitated it into the abyss.


End file.
